I am diminished, with or without you
by expletive deleted
Summary: By the time that Komui found his sister, he had spent a long time preparing for the worst.


锘?html> **Notes:** Spoilers for the manga up to _48th Night: Memory of Everlasting Darkness_. The title is from the song "We Do Not Belong Together" by Stephen Sondheim in the musical _Sunday in the Park with George_. Constructive criticism is welcome.

* * *

"I wish I didn't have to say this." Gardner paused heavily. "I think it is necessary to warn you to expect the worst. From all reports, your sister has not been in a good state of mind in these past few months particularly."

Komui paused in his packing to smile, a kind of thanks for his frankness, and a way to ease the man who had been friendly to him this past year with the Church. There was relief and rue in that smile. "General, expecting the worst is easy - I've been doing it for a while now. It would have meant not finding her."

General Gardner nodded awkward assent, face still creased with concern.

"She'll be better once I'm with her again," Komui said.

"It's taken damnably long," Gardner growled. "These past few weeks' delay--" He broke off, and his moustache bristled ferociously in indignation.

Though he knew that it would be best to disagree, Komui could only turn his face away. He bent his head, packing a few more items that would travel with him to the Black Order's headquarters into the cardboard box on his desk. "I'm simply glad that my superiors have been convinced that I don't intend to leave with her." He looked up and managed a smile. "But after all, the Black Order _will_ be the best place to make our home, considering the proliferation of akuma. Not to mention that Lenalee must be trained to get the most out of her Innocence."

Gardner looked at him with sadness. "It is a good thing that we do here - that is what it's intended to be."

Komui found that Gardner's accent struck him most heavily when the man spoke of the Church in a defensive manner, and that in return his own accent became thicker and made him harder for the Englishman to understand. He modulated his voice carefully into the accent that he had practised to near-perfection when he spoke: "I know it is. I believe in the cause that we fight for. After all, my parents... And perhaps the Black Order saved my sister, after all."

Gardner left him with a few more words - this time attempting encouragement - and a strong handshake. Komui rubbed his face around the mouth when Gardner left. He remembered when conversations with his superior had left him exhausted, his face stiff from falsified smiles. The man was kind, and while loyal to the Church, had been with it long enough to have seen and acknowledged its faults, and in due time, Komui's need to act had wound down. They were not friends, but he was grateful to General Gardner.

Komui smiled again - quite naturally - hoping that soon, when Lenalee was with him, he might look for real friends within the Black Order. The war wasn't going to end anytime soon, after all. 

- - - 

It wasn't as bad as he'd made himself expect: She was alive, and she would recover.

They let her stay in his room that night and the next, only reminding him on the third night, in a kindly, faintly nervous way, that she would soon have to return to the dormitories. Komui readjusted his glasses for a moment of thought, and then smiled assent.

As Science Group Supervisor, he helped fill gaps left by the limited number of Exorcists with his machines and designs, and he had power - but the plan was to work at Black Order Headquarters for years, and he couldn't afford to make many exceptions early in his career. By simply giving him the warning, they reminded him of that.

Exceptions would be turned into what they would call abuse of power, and that would threaten his position. He might be sent on his way easily enough if they required it, but his sister was a precious Exorcist; she would stay behind.

Komui took Lenalee aside and explained that she would return to the dormitory where the other female exorcists slept, and that she could tell all her friends about her handsome brother.

Then he had to hold her a long while, repeating that she would see him every day - that she _must_, or her smitten friends would hear no new reports of his doings!

"And I'd miss you if you didn't," he said, arms around her. She nodded into his shoulder.

Over the months they learned to work together to change as little as possible about the requirements imposed on them while making their life bearable. Lenalee learnt that he was there not only to take care of her, but to do important work for the Church, and like a little animal with an instinct for danger, she realised swiftly that he might get sent away if there were no work to do. She led him through the austere maze of rooms to his office each day, taking a few minutes out of breakfast and lunch time to tow him along.

She took only a few minutes during the day, to appease the nurses that insisted that she be kept under supervision, and was allowed two hours after supper when she and her brother were left alone to talk.

Lenalee still cried to leave the Black Order, but it wasn't every day anymore.

Komui noted that his fearlessly open-hearted sister had become crafty. On occasion, when faced with the orders of her caretakers and instructors, she swallowed heavily and her eyes grew immense, but she never gave away more of her emotions than that. When she was alone with him, with thick wooden doors and drapery-dressed stone walls to muffle sounds, she cried. It happened often, over what seemed to be everything. Komui let her crouch in his lap and listened.

"I saw a boy. He's pale, and thin, and they said he couldn't hear. He waved at me... Do you know him?" Lenalee hiccoughed and shook, and Komui squeezed her shoulders.

"Did you wave back? I hope so."

"No! I didn't think of it!" Lenalee looked up, distraught, but Komui only smiled, and her terror-sadness cleared a moment at the sight. "I smiled back a little..."

"Good," Komui said. "I'm sure he'll remember that, no matter what." Then he did something stupid; he began to make a promise.

"When did you see him last?" Komui asked. "Perhaps we can find him. Introduce the two of you properly, and you'll be friends. Even better friends, because you've already started."

Lenalee's eyes were wide, and her lips began to quiver. She drew up the folds of his coat and buried her face. "I saw him before you came. He was with Hevlaska."

"When?" He couldn't help the urgency in his voice, even telling himself that Lenalee had good instincts and wouldn't cry so hard if she had hope. She was the clever one; he was just the genius.

"Before they tied me. Long before."

Komui gave up on showing her that everything was all right and wrapped his arms around her. Lenalee's voice was small and shaking, and terribly certain: "You haven't seen him."

"Maybe later," Komui said.

Lenalee stayed silent. She _was_ the clever one. 

- - - 

The open-plan room was a muted roar of work. Messages passed to and fro - called out or written - work was cursed, coffee drunk with grateful slurps. There was the occasional shout as Reever told Komui to stop slacking off - like now, as Komui began to question earnestly the philosophical beliefs of the man who had delivered a folder to him.

Komui tried to waste a bit more time with a pout at Reever as he took the folder, but Reever dived behind his piles of paperwork. Then Komui glanced at the folder, and his face grew quiet and contemplative.

_Compatibility, Innocence and exorcist — The Fall_, was scribbled on the cover, the writing blotchy.

It looked a lot like the way Komui marked his own work. Hurried, for his use, with the expectation that those who needed to would comprehend it. Lenalee said that hardly anyone did, though, and he should really get a secretary for writing things out.

Komui steeled himself to stop thinking in sideways patterns and lay the folder down. He paged through it, taking note of all photographs. He stopped only near the end, glimpsing the details of one of the last subjects in the experiments aimed at coaxing an Exorcist out of a normal human being.

After a minute or so, Komui looked up, reached out to pick up a wrench from the corner of the desk, and give it a smacking kiss.

"Brother! You still do that!" Lenalee giggled where she sat at the windowsill, kicking her heels idly as she looked out over the busy floor, her back to the hilltop view outside.

"My tools must know I love them," he said piously. "They won't work right if treated with a callous touch!" There were muffled groans from around the room, and Komui ducked a wadded ball of paper. He glimpsed Reever grinning as he hid behind his paperwork again, and it almost got him to smile as he did the same. He took up his pen and dragged his doodling paper closer, so that it would take a few minutes before they noticed he was slacking off.

It had been four years, now, that he hadn't looked for the boy Lenalee had spoken of. Thin, pale, and deaf weren't much to go on anyway, but mostly he couldn't afford it. The Black Order could always find another clever engineer if their current Science Group Supervisor was making things difficult.

These days they were telling him that Lenalee's psychiatric assessments were markedly improved. She could put on a beautiful smile, when she had to, and lied with the grace of any young woman under siege. She would not even have to lie a great deal: She'd made friends, blossomed in her freer life with the Black Priesthood, and found her task with the Innocence one that she was glad to perform.

They did not know that half her friends were phantoms in her mind. The boy she saw once, years ago, whose face had been clear to her nearly three years after she saw him, and which he did not doubt was still clear to her. She no longer cried to leave the Black Order, but her smiles were wet-eyed when anyone she knew even in passing was called out to a different branch of the Church, and even on the most ordinary of days she came to sit and watch him work.

As if he could blame her. He put a hand on his wrench, and from force of carefully cultivated habit, gave a prayer of thanks for his skills. Without them, how would he have found a chance to come here, to Lenalee?

Komui admitted to himself that, after all, he had ended up expecting too much. He lifted his head and looked for his sister on the windowsill. She was already looking at him, and smiled first: brilliance and beauty, with the sun through the window drawing sparks of red from her hair. She looked knowing. And a little sad.

Naturally, he had to smile back.


End file.
